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Foreword David Ehrenfeld Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and ... all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here.... And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that ... the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive. -Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea afStories (1990) He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution. -AIdo Leopold, "Bur Oak," in A Sand CauntyAlmanac (1949) I({i:> As I look out the sealed window of the Environmental and Natural Resource Science Building where I work, I can see the middle-aged students who are taking the short course in Global Positioning System Training and Certification. They are pacing slowly and solemnly about the grassy circle in front of the building, staring fixedly at the GPS meters in their hands, yellow equipment packs with stout antennas strapped to their backs. Occasionally they pass the little bur oak that was planted in the center of the circle last year-one of only five bur oaks on campus -and their antennas brush its leaves, but they don't notice; it has no message for them. They are too busy, waiting for orbiting satellites to tell them where they are. The world has changed in many ways since Aldo Leopold died in 1948, perhaps most of all in the barriers we have erected between ourselves and nature. Yet Leopold's words remain as vivid and compelling as ever. Never mind that increasing numbers ofAmericans have never seen and never will see the mists advance "like the white ghost of a glacier ... riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog-meadows heavy with dew." Nor are they likely, any more, to experience "a single silence," which "hangs from horizon to horizon."1 Leopold calls to something deeper within us even than our personal memories, an elemental awareness of nature that resides in our cells and circulates with our blood. He does this in one of the few ways left that can penetrate the defensive xi xii Foreword shell of our unnatural civilization and reconnect us with the world outside -he does it by telling stories. AIdo Leopold was a storyteller, and the source ofhis stories, his master teacher, was nature. He admitted as much toward the end of his life, in ''Wherefore Wildlife Ecology?": "I am trying to teach you that this alphabet of 'natural objects' (soils and rivers, birds and beasts) spells out a story, which he who runs may read-if he knows how. Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to yoU."2 Most of the stories that Leopold tells are not long and formal like the history, recorded in A Sand County Almanac, of the celebrated lightningkilled oak he and his wife, Estella, sawed for firewood on his Wisconsin farm one crisp February day. That chronology, traced through the eighty annual rings traversed by the singing saw, took twelve pages to tell. More often, Leopold's stories are brief, as concise as poetry: "In the creekbottom pasture, flood trash is lodged high in the bushes. The creek banks are raw; chunks of Illinois have sloughed off and moved seaward. Patches of giant ragweed mark where freshets have thrown down the silt they could not carry."3 And some of his stories are shorter still, at least in their essential elements: 'just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer."4 The language that Leopold used is as elegant as it is effective. In our times, when television and networks of electronic communication require a ceaseless outpouring of words to stave off the new devil of silence , language often becomes a mere stitching together of stale phrases. Even a Dickens might have trouble maintaining inventiveness in the face of such an unholy demand for utterance. Against this drab background the words of AIdo Leopold stand out like a snow-covered mountain peak rising...

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